Jalbum appoints Skype co-creator as CEO and closes second round

Funding round completed

Jalbum, an online site for photo sharing, appointed Andreas Sjölund as Chief Executive Officer as it closed a second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners.

A serial entrepreneur, Sjölund brings 12 years of experience in creating and developing consumer Internet companies, most notably as co-founder of the Internet telephone company Skype and one of the first employees in KaZaA.

Jalbum founder David Ekholm will stay on as CTO and will remain on the board of the Stockholm-based company. “We are very excited to welcome Andreas Sjölund as the new CEO of Jalbum," said Ekholm.

“I am ecstatic about joining David and the Jalbum team at such a pivotal time in the company's history,” Sjölund said. “I've been a regular user of the free Jalbum software for several years, using it to share my personal photo collection online in great looking web albums. The potential for Jalbum to give everyone with a digital camera the power to easily control the presentation of their images and determine where they are hosted is truly disruptive. We've only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with this unique distribution model.”

Jalbum also announced the closing of a second round of financing from Nordic Venture Partners, bringing total capital raised to SEK 23 Million SEK ($3.2 million). The round will be used to accelerate product and business development.

Per von Zelowitz, Partner of Nordic Venture Partners said, “Jalbum is one of the leading global online photo sharing communities. They are the only one with the clear differentiators of freedom of expression, sharing and distribution. We are very pleased with the fantastic growth the company has achieved and are excited to support its continued expansion and substantially strengthened management team. We are confident about the commercial prospects for Jalbum in this large and rapidly growing market.”

To date Jalbum users have published more than 24 million customised albums to hundreds of thousands of web sites globally.